Abstract
The author takes up three metaphysical conceptions of morality — realism, projectivism, constructivism — and the account of justification or reason that makes these pictures possible. It is argued that the right meta-ethical conception should be the one that entails the most plausible conception of reason-giving, rather than by any other consideration. Realism and projectivism, when understood in ways consistent with their fundamental commitments, generate unsatisfactory models of justification; constructivism alone does not. The author also argues for a particular interpretation of how “objective moral obligation” is to be understood within constructivism.
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Notes
Rawls himself explicitly distances his constructivism from traditional moral realism in (Rawls 1980). See in particular Lecture III, “Construction and Objectivity.” That it would be very strange, to say the least, to call Gilbert Harman a “moral realist” I take to be obvious, but if realism really simply is the view that sentences expressing moral claims are sometimes true, and they are so in virtue of some counterpart truth-maker in the world, then he surely is one. For the relevant Harman reading, see (Harman 1977).
It is also worth noting that every meta-ethicist who holds morality arises through intentional activity, be this the argument of the constructivist, the utilitarian, or the Harman like social relativist variety, will also be a “token identity realist” — every moral judgment token will be realized in the world, and as such, may also be picked out by a wholly non-normative vocabulary. In this respect, this “realism” is analogous to the token identity realism the Fodor like functionalist holds with respect to mousetraps or pain states. Every mousetrap-event or pain-event is identical to some material description. The truth conditions for what constitutes a mousetraps or pain very much lie elsewhere. This thesis of “realism,” if it is one, is really quite weak; it simply amounts to the claim that there is just one world out there (no Cartesian or Platonic entities) and everything realized is realized in it. See also the argument in Section 4.
This is not to deny one could, as a moral realist, hold that how people feel is relevant to how goodness is conceptually and factually fixed. It may be that “goodness” is conceptually and extensionally identical to some distribution of satisfactions over a population, for example, as some forms of utilitarianism hold. But if goodness is conceptually or extensionally equivalent to some set of psychological facts regarding happiness and satisfaction that is one thing. It is not my attitude towards this distribution, my reaction to this fact that has any bearing on moral goodness — not at least if we are going to be true moral realists.
There are also constitutive claims that are merely semantic of course: for example, the fact that I am an uncle is constituted by the fact that I have a nephew, but I will assume that no moral realist is interested in making uninteresting assertions of that kind — “goodness is constituted by rightness,” for example — and so I will set that version of “constitutive realism” aside.
This remark assumes that the projectivist account on offer is not put forward in a deflationist spirit, holding moral judgments to be empty or in error. I will simply set this “eliminativist” variant of projectivism aside. My interest lies with those, like Hume, Hare, and most recently Blackburn, who seek to show that the projectivist analysis is, to varying degrees, quite consistent with how moral practice, and specifically, moral justification is typically conceived, or thought of, when within it as a first order practice. By contrast, for the “eliminativist” projectivist argument, see (Mackie 1977).
Of course, Hume says “willful murder,” and not “a killing,” but I do not believe he is entitled to this move; calling it a murder is to say it is unjustified, and language like that does not belong in the world of “facts and relations.”
See especially the chapter in (Hare 1963).
Of course, they could in a particular case be coextensive. Hitchcock’s music in Vertigo can cause me ill ease, and I can also see that this is genuinely spooky music. But of course, it must be possible for these judgments to come apart as well — it must be possible for me to see, at some point, that this music has a certain intentional character, that the attribution “the music is spooky” is merited, without actually being caused to feel anything. The merit judgment must lie on grounds independent of any particular causal story, tied to things like choices within a repertoire and so forth, and of course any such attribution survives counterfactuals to the causal story that may or may not be concurrent with it. (“This would be spooky music even if I did not feel this way when listening to it.”)
I will be discussing Blackburn’s view largely in so far as it is expressed in Blackburn (1988); to some extent, I will also draw on arguments made in his more recent Ruling Passions. I do not see the later work as an improvement, and in any event, as I argue below, whatever differences there are across these works are irrelevant to my argument against him here.
As he says elsewhere in Ruling Passions, “We can add flowers without end” (Blackburn 1998: p.79)
It would be nice if I could simply say “no objectivist” without qualification, but alas, of course, there is intuitionism. Once that is set aside, and we look at say Kant, Mill or Aristotle, among others, the generalization holds.
It is actually perhaps no surprise at all. Since Hume, projectivists have often sought to downplay the implausibility of their picture by downplaying or saying little about well-founded moral disagreement, which seems so unsatisfactorily described within projectivist views. Hence the inevitable reliance on a rhetoric of stability, on what is or is not “attractive” or “part of good moralizing” and the like in Blackburn’s writings. See (Blackburn 1997: p. 173).
Let us not get too distracted by my use of “we” here — I mean by this only something like what every other constructivist seems to mean: we are to think of persons as rational creatures with an affective psychology who in turn think of themselves as able to live under cooperative norms they freely accept. See the Rawls and Scanlon (1980).
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Ross, S. Meta-ethics and Justification. Acta Anal 23, 91–114 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0023-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0023-3